Empire App Spotlight: uHealth

The Empire App Spotlight is back and sporting a unique new app, uHealth.

On the heels of our ‘Skip a Beat’ Empire App Spotlight, I wanted to continue the health trend and find another mobile app that uses biofeedback in a meaningful way. And considering Apple’s recent emphasis on HealthKit and the newly minted ResearchKit, mobile apps utilizing biofeedback will only become more prominent in the development community so we may as well embrace them.

So, what is uHealth? uHealth is a simplistic app that uses eye tracking technology to train your eye focus. Using developer Umoove Ltd. eye tracking technology and your phones built-in camera, uHealth tracks your eyes positions through an increasingly more challenging ‘training process’ to help you be more productive and more successful at school or work.

The ‘training process’ is simple, at least it starts that way. You start with a nice quant outdoor scene, two birds sit at either end of the screen, one yellow, the other blue. Soon the pleasant yet omniscient voice of your ‘trainer’ kicks in.

Your trainer instructs you where you should be looking. Avert your eyes even for a second and you will get a point deducted; lose all four points and you will have to restart.

Simple enough, right? Well that’s only level 1. Each level from there gets increasingly more difficult to stay focused. Your trainer will attempt to trick you, the background will become more chaotic, and the number of commands you have to follow will increase.

Even the progress bar at the top seems designed to distract you.

But no matter how difficult the levels get, the ultimate test will always being keeping your eyes focused when you get a Twitter notification.

My biggest issue with uHealth is how it handles level progression. In order to move onto the next level, you will need to play your current level roughly 7 times to get enough attention points to move on.

Again, simple enough, right? Wrong.

uHealth encourages user retention by only allowing you to earn points once a day. Play your current level twice in one day and the second attempt will be categorized as ‘practice’ – meaning it takes about a week to complete a level; baring you don’t to ‘train’ once a day.

Despite being my biggest issue, the level progression is fairly forgivable. The science behind uHealth states training your eyes consistently and gradually is the ideal way to improve focus.

It’s a good mechanic to stop users from blasting through every level in a day, missing the benefit *and point* of the app, but when you’ve been playing the same simple entrance level for 6 days straight you start to become hungry for more.

I wonder how uHealth will fair in the marketplace; considering it’s competition, Elevate Brain Training and Lumosity to name a few, uHealth may be lacking the content and variety that excel it’s competitors forward.

But for a free app with a strong, singular focus, you can’t go wrong with uHealth – actually you are probably much worse off without uHealth so do yourself a favour and check it out.